Miller: A city with Super Bowl-sized spirit

NEW ORLEANS – He came here to become a famous chef and start a kick-butt band.

Ten years later, he's a cook. At Kubi's Bar & Cafe, the sort of place where they don't take reservations but they do deliver – until 4 a.m.

Despite his dreams being delayed here – and, let's be honest, probably even dying here – he has no plans to leave.

"Why would I?" says the man who, for reasons he won't share, would prefer to remain nameless. "This is my home, and I'm proud of it. Look at her on display right now. New Orleans has been prostituting herself out for three centuries, and she isn't going to stop in the next few days."

Other cities have tostagea party. This city is a party. All she has to do is wake up each morning, shake off the night before and be herself.

That's what we have here again this week, as Super Bowl XLVII and all the joyful chaos and wondrous calamity that come with the game visit.

The Super Bowl takes its time getting here. Unlike other sports, where they take maybe two weeks to finish a best-of-seven series, the NFL plays once in 14 days.

That's a lot of drinking time, one whopper of a tailgate in a city where, just Thursday night, a 200-room venue that had been transformed, re-opened as the Bud Light Hotel.

"We don't have to create anything in New Orleans," says political analyst James Carville, the co-chair of the local Super Bowl host committee. "It's already here. It's been here for 294 years. We have to take things, shine 'em up a little bit, add a little something here and there, but everything else stands on its own."

She is standing again, all right, this city that, in August of 2005, was drowning. Hurricane Katrina tried to kill New Orleans and, as it was, claimed more than 1,800 souls.

Parts of the city – particularly the Lower Ninth Ward, just five miles from where Super Bowl XLVII will kick off – remain in tatters. Houses are vacant and crumbling under the neglect. Businesses remain abandoned and ghostly. Front doors still bear the chilling spray painted X's used to mark homes as uninhabitable.

New Orleans has come back, spectacularly so in some places. She's just not all the way back. Not yet.

It is a process, a long and sometimes excruciating one. But isn't that how recovery often goes when death has come so near?

"A short time ago, this city was 15 feet under water, and it was on the bottom of every list that mattered," New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu says. "You've watched a group of people pick themselves up, dry themselves off and start taking one step at a time to rebuild their lives and their community."

She doesn't ask for your sympathy, but your understanding is appreciated. New Orleans doesn't need pity, not with skin as thick as the Mississippi River is wide.

The last time the folks here had this event was 2002, the first Super Bowl following 9/11. Along Poydras Street leading up to the Superdome's front door, there were iron barricades, armed soldiers and real tanks.

Some doubted New Orleans' ability to host that party. Some doubted her ability to host this one, too.

In 2002, they struggled to fill the 5,000 volunteer positions needed for the Super Bowl. This time around, Cicero says 17,000 signed up to give away their time for the cause and for the city.

"You people from elsewhere need to believe this when we say it," Cicero explains. "There's a new spirit now in New Orleans."

And a big part of it, naturally, is the old spirit.

Over at the Alibi, on Iberville Street, there are still only two rules, at least according to the signs hanging on one wall:

1) No Refunds On the Cigarette Machine.

2) Only Topless Women Allowed in Kitchen.

Along Jackson Square, the artists still mingle with the tarot card readers, bohemians and squatters.

Bourbon Street remains the most intoxicating thoroughfare in America, with its cold drinks, spicy eats and staggering ability tostagger, where the smell of police-horse manure still mixes with the odor of human urine.

And you never know where you're going to find religion, right? Standing at the corner of Bourbon and Orleans Avenue at night, looking south, the image of Jesus Christ can be seen, projected as a shadow on the back of St. Louis Cathedral.

He has his hands raised, blessing a city that deserves it, that has earned it.

"Y'all continue to doubt New Orleans' ability to step forward and raise our game," Landrieu says. "We continue to prove people wrong and we always will."

Personally, I wouldn't doubt the mayor. But what do I know? I'm just another one of New Orleans' many, many tricks.